Blog - Typisch deutsch

The Times in London has, I believe, a Top-secret think-tank. Its one aim is to dream up ways of humiliating its pale and overweight German correspondent. So it came as no surprise when a young editor, barely suppressing his giggles, suggested I join the first all-naked flight to be organised in Germany. Britons find nudity hilarious. Germans take it very seriously. I don’t know which is worse but I do know it is one of those civilisational frontiers that divide Germany from much of the rest of the world.

            The flights begin in July, from Erfurt to Heringsdorf in Usedom. The passengers will be able to get in the mood for the Naturist beaches of the Baltic Sea. If they prove successful, who knows where they will lead? Nudist taxis? Trains for naked passengers?

            Enrico Hess, the originator of the idea, explained that naked customers were big business. Fair enough. But all I could think of was: what if a colleague ends up sitting in the next seat? Hot tea will be banned to protect ones body parts, but it does seem to be a very cold way of travelling. I can only think of three advantages to naked travel. Your clothes don’t get creased. You won’t get stuck with one of those irritating fellow passengers who take out their wallets and start to show you pictures of their families, their house, their boat. And the chances of a terrorist being on-board are reduced. Certainly no shoe-bomber.

            But, of course, I am missing the point. Germans see nudism – sorry naturalism – differently. It has, at least since the end of the 19^th century, been part of a movement to get back to nature. To free oneself – hence the name, Freikörperkultur – from religious strictures that teach you to be ashamed of your body. To free oneself from industrial society – without clothes no-one is a factory slave, everyone is equal. Significantly the first FKK Verein was established (in 1898) in smoky Essen. It was a primitive kind of Socialism which was why the bureaucratic communists of East Germany, Ulbricht and co, hated it so much. They understood that when their citizens stripped off, they were shedding the system. In the 1950s the communists tried to ban the nudists. Then the naked rebels came up with the idea of organising “Cameroon Festivals”, apparently celebrating fraternal friendship between the GDR and the African country but, in fact, just an excuse for hundreds to dance naked on the beach. Stasi files quote a police chief from the resort of Prerow as reporting to the leadership in 1954: “The Cameroon Festivals are an insult to the morals and traditions of the Negro people.” When he dispatched policemen to stop the naked dancers, they were thrown into the sea.

            That sounds a bit like a Californian beach party. But it isn’t: in Germany, nudity is ideological. The East German regime came to accept naturalism and many ordinary people embraced it as the one popular movement that was not organised or steered by the state. Soon after unification, a photo exhibition of East German nudists was staged in Berlin. The most revealing body parts of these people, posing in front of their Trabants or on Brandenburg potato fields, was their eyes. The eyes of rebels.

            In West Germany stripping off was never quite as political. But it was hemmed in by regulations. And that too was typisch deutsch. After 1968, naked flesh became more socially acceptable: no magazine cover was complete without bare breasts. So the FKK had to set up rules for the unclothed to protect its monopoly position. For years there has been a sectarian battle about whether people wearing a t-shirt or a bikini bottom can enter a FKK beach.

            For outsiders like myself there is something a bit crazy about this. I too have been expelled from a fitness centre because I wanted to wear swimming trunks in the sauna and the whirlpool. This, I was told, was “unhygienic”. What, I wondered, was unhygienic about swimming trunks? And what was so hygienic about nudity? I left the sauna feeling like Adam thrown out of paradise for having unclean thoughts. Nudity in Germany, it seems, cannot function without senseless regulation, bureaucratic clothing.

            Perhaps I shall see you soon on Nudist Airlines. You will recognise me: I will be the one with a copy of the Times covering his lower parts.

Mit vier klimatötenden Plastiktüten aus dem Mema- Supermarkt stolpernd, wurde ich das jüngste, möglicherweise letzte Opfer von Rudi Dutschke: Weil mein Verstand im Alter nachlässt, weil ich eine stärkere Brille brauche, jedenfalls trat ich auf die regennassen Blumen vor dem Dutschke-Gedenkstein auf dem Ku’damm, rutschte auf dem Pflaster aus und verdrehte mir beim Versuch, das Gleichgewicht zu behalten, die Schulter.

Bis jetzt hatte ich nichts Persönliches gegen Dutschke. Der Stein – der jenen Ort markiert, an dem Dutschke im April 1968 angeschossen wurde – ist merkwürdig. Soweit ich weiß, starb er erst 1979, oder? Meiner Meinung nach markiert man den Geburtsort eines Menschen von historischer Bedeutung, den Ort, wo er ein wichtiges Buch verfasst oder eine besondere Rede gehalten hat, das Haus, in dem er gestorben ist. Das war’s – es sei denn, es handelt sich um einen Nationalhelden, einen Märtyrer. Ist Dutschke das? Und wenn ja, wäre es dann nicht sinnvoller, Schönefeld nach ihm zu benennen – „Rudi Dutschke International Airport“? So könnte man die Bayern zwingen, von Franz Josef Strauß nach Rudi Dutschke zu fliegen.

Dass ich durcheinander war, als ich auf den Ku’damm trat, lag an einem kleinem Wortwechsel an der Kasse. Eine Frau bezweifelte die Korrektheit der Rechnung. Sie sollte 40 Euro bezahlen, dabei hatten sie nicht einmal die aus Italien eingeflogenen Heidelbeeren in ihren Wagen gelegt. Sie hatte lediglich ein Lammschnitzel gekauft, etwas Gemüse, Milch für Cornflakes und zwei Rollen Klopapier. „Noch nie im Leben hab ich so viel für Brot bezahlt!“, sagte sie und sah aus, als ob gleich eine Träne die eingepuderten Furchen ihrer Wange hinablaufen würde. Kurz überlegte ich, ob das stimmen kann – der Brotpreis, relativ zum Einkommen, muss in den 70ern viel höher gewesen sein –, aber es war nicht der richtige Zeitpunkt für Geschichtsunterricht.

Was passiert, ist, dass eine globale Entwicklung auch die Berliner erreicht. Nahrungsmittelkämpfe brechen aus, in Ägypten, Honduras, Haiti. Einige Länder verbieten den Reisexport, um die Lage zu beruhigen. Irgendetwas geht gerade richtig schief. Brot wird in der Tat teurer – und der Anstieg der Getreidepreise kann dabei nur eine kleine Rolle spielen.

Wenn ich meine Dutschke-Texte richtig gelesen habe, dann wäre er zufrieden mit dieser Zuspitzung. Zu seiner Zeit waren die großen Themen Überbevölkerung, Hunger und die üblen Versuche des kapitalistischen Amerika, sein neokoloniales Imperium zu cocacolaisieren. Außerhalb vom Asta war all das von eher untergeordneter Bedeutung. Heute, dem Internet und einer veränderten Medienlandschaft sei Dank, ist den Berlinern diese globale Verbindung bewusster. Georg Milbradt tritt zurück wegen der Finanzpolitik einiger US-Banken? Undenkbar in jeder anderen Epoche der deutschen Geschichte. Dutschke hätte darin eine vorrevolutionäre Situation gesehen, er hätte die Stadtguerilla angestachelt, die Unruhen in der entwickelten Welt vor die Tore von Siemens und anderen Multis zu bringen.

Man muss sich die Kleinanzeigen am Schwarzen Brett von Mema anschauen: „26er Damenrad 40 Euro Festpreis“; „Verkaufe wegen Auswanderung Hundesofa (braun) 30 Euro“; „Philips Mikrofon ca. 60 Jahre alt, 60 Euro“. Das sind Hilferufe einer Mittelschicht, die wenig vom ökonomischen Aufschwung profitiert hat und sich gegen schlechte Zeiten wappnet.

Nur 100 Meter weiter runter, auf der anderen Seite des Ku’damm, ist in der Karlsruher Straße das Aspria, das Lieblingsfitnessstudio der Promis. Dort liest man am Schwarzen Brett: „Drei Karten für Abbado“; Mahagoni-Tisch (1850) 500 Euro; „Ferienhaus auf Sardinien zu verkaufen“. Die Gehaltsklasse ist eine andere, der Unterton von Panik ist derselbe. Die globale Krise kommt näher, sie klopft an unsere Tür.

Dutschkes Schlussfolgerung wäre: Die Armen und die Reichen verlieren den Glauben ans kapitalistische System. Die Reichen werden das System mit Gewalt verteidigen, die Armen müssen sich diesem Kampf stellen.

Doch das Merkwürdige: Nirgendwo im Westen gibt es Anzeichen für eine Revolution. Könnte es sein, dass Dutschke falsch lag? Dass fast nichts, was Dutschke auf den Barrikaden gesprochen hat, von Dauer war? Dass der Gedenkstein auf dem Ku’damm keinen Helden ehrt, sondern eine Fußnote der Geschichte? Dutschke wäre heute 68 und ich wette, er würde nicht die Weltrevolution predigen, nicht einmal Lafontaine wählen. Er würde seinen Zettel im Aspria aufhängen: Vier-Zimmer- Sommerhaus in Florida zu verkaufen.

Trotzdem, ’tschuldigung, dass ich auf deine Blumen gelatscht bin, Rudi. (Meine Schulter tut noch immer weh.)

Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Moritz Schuller.

(Erschienen im gedruckten Tagesspiegel vom 19.04.2008)

Der Mann mit dem albernen Lächeln, 70er-Jahre-Kassenbrille, Birkenstocks und der Safrankutte kommt einem irgendwie bekannt vor. Schlürft einen Himbeer-Frapuccino mit einem Schuss Karamell im Starbucks am Ku’damm. Ja, das war sicher der Dalai Lama, ganz allein in Berlin. Vollkommen nachvollziehbar: Wenn der einzige Freund Roland Koch heißt, wer würde dann nicht lieber allein absurd teuren Kaffee trinken und, wie sonst auch, über die sieben (sechs? acht?) Wege zum Glück nachdenken?

Viele weise Männer – Keynes, Oscar Wilde – haben behauptet, es sei Ausdruck intellektueller Reife, seine Meinung zu ändern. Ich bin eigentlich überhaupt kein Anhänger von Veränderung. Gefällt mir eine Hose, dann trage ich sie jeden Tag, bis sie auseinanderfällt, und ein wenig geht es mir auch so mit meinen politischen Überzeugungen. Aber im Fall des Dalai Lama muss ich mich korrigieren. Vor einigen Monaten habe ich Angela Merkel kritisiert, weil sie den Dalai Lama getroffen hat. Es wirkte wie ein weiterer folgenloser Akt aus dem Versöhnungstheater, das die Spezialität der Kanzlerin zu sein scheint. Worum ging es – ein Interesse am Buddhismus deutlich zu machen? An Spiritualität? An Tibet? Am Prinzip autonomer Herrschaft in Polizeistaaten? Oder darum, eine kritische Haltung zu den Menschenrechten in China zu heucheln, wohl wissend, dass die deutsche Wirtschaft auch dann noch dort Handel betreiben wird, wenn (Gott bewahre!) regimekritische Mönche an den Laternen aufgeknüpft werden? Ich war deshalb auf Steinmeiers Seite: Es schien ehrlicher, den Dalai Lama als einen unbedeutenden geistlichen Führer zu betrachten, der über gute Freunde in Hollywood verfügt.

Jetzt bin ich anderer Meinung. Ganz klar, es wäre politisch redlich, den Dalai Lama in Berlin zu empfangen. Die Chinesen selbst haben ihn zu einer wichtigen politischen Figur hochgestuft. So beschreibt ihn die kommunistische Führung in Peking: „ein Schakal in Buddhistenrobe und ein böser Geist mit menschlichem Antlitz und dem Herz einer Bestie“. Sogar Joschka Fischer in Hoch-Zeiten hätte gezögert, sich eines solchen Vokabulars zu bedienen. Während des Treffens im Kanzleramt gab es noch wenig zu besprechen. In dieser Woche gibt es Themen ohne Ende – stattdessen verstecken sich alle unter ihren Tischen, um bloß nicht mit dem Mann in Safran fotografiert zu werden. Berlin sollte eine objektive Untersuchung der Vorfälle in Tibet fordern und internationale Beobachter für die Prozesse gegen Tibeter, die Chinesen dazu bewegen, die Provinz für internationale Journalisten zu öffnen, und Peking daran erinnern, dass ihre Verfassung die Religionsfreiheit garantiert. Vielleicht macht Steinmeier all das hinter verschlossenen Türen, aber jetzt ist der Zeitpunkt, es auch öffentlich zu tun. Wenn die Kanzlerin den Dalai Lama trifft, um ihre Haltung zu den Menschenrechten öffentlich zu unterstreichen, dann sollte sie von dieser Position nicht abrücken, wenn es hart auf hart kommt.

Merkel hatte eine gute Ausrede, den Dalai Lama nicht zu treffen: Sie ist gar nicht im Land. Steinmeier wiederum, so könnte man argumentieren, war wohl einfach zu erschöpft, nachdem er eine Woche lang in Russland beinhart die Menschrechte verteidigt hatte. Und der Präsident? Horst Köhler, der über der Parteipolitik schwebt, beschäftigt sich doch sonst auch immer mit dem ethischen Leben der Deutschen.

Ich habe nichts gegen Heuchelei. Wie auch, ich bin Engländer. Sie ist – wie ein faszinierendes neues Buch des Politologen David Runciman („Political hypocrisy: the Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and beyond“) erklärt – das notwendige Schmiermittel in der politischen Maschine. Runciman unterscheidet die „Heuchelei erster Ordnung“, bei der Politiker die öffentliche Rede nutzen, um Laster als Tugend zu verkleiden, von der „Heuchelei zweiter Ordnung“, bei der Politiker diesen Vorgang vor sich selbst geheim halten. Ersteres, die Kultur der Übertreibung und der gutmütigen Täuschung, ist Teil sozialer Existenz; Letzteres ist gefährlich.

Es ist genau das, wessen sich die Regierung schuldig macht: Sie versucht sich selbst davon zu überzeugen, dass sie den Menschenrechten dient, indem sie den exilierten geistigen Führer Tibets ignoriert – obwohl sie ihn in die Arme geschlossen hat, als die politischen Kosten gering waren. Was für eine Botschaft sendet ein solches Verhalten an Unternehmen, bei denen Korruption und moralische Schlechtigkeit Teil des einst so stolzen Etiketts „Made in Germany“ geworden sind?

Die deutschen Wähler fordern Klarheit nicht nur im politischen Handeln, sondern auch in der Sprache. Und die sucht man bei der großen Koalition vergeblich.

Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Moritz Schuller.

(Erschienen im gedruckten Tagesspiegel vom 17.05.2008)

Stumbling out of Mema with four climate-destroying plastic bags I became the latest, possibly the last, victim of Rudi Dutschke.

Perhaps my brain is addled by age, perhaps I simply need stronger glasses, whatever the reason I somehow managed to tread on the

Rain-soaked flowers at the Ku’damm memorial stone for Dutschke, slip on the wet concrete and wrench my shoulder while trying to restore my balance. Why I can’t fall, like normal people, on a wet bathroom floor or while running for the bus, is baffling.

Until now I have had nothing personal against Dutschke. True, the stone – marking, of course, the place where he was shot in April 1968 – is a bit of mystery. I mean, the man did not die until 1979, right? Eleven years later. It seems to me you mark the birthplace of someone of historical importance, the place where he wrote his definitive book or delivered an extra-ordinary speech, the house or battlefield where he died. And that’s it. Unless he is a national hero, a national martyr. Is Dutschke really that? If he is then it would make more sense to name Schönefeld after him – Rudi Dutschke International Airport – rather than a paving stone near Mema. Then, at least, you could force Bavarians to fly from Franz Joseph Strauß to Rudi Dutschke.

The reason I was distracted on the Ku’damm was a small argument at the Mema cash till. A woman could not believe her bill. It had come to 40 euros and she hadn’t even bought the Heidelbeeren flown in from Italy nor the Brombeeren flown in from Mexico. No, she had simply bought a lambchop for dinner, some vegetables, milk for her cornflakes, two rolls of toilet paper. “Nie im Leben hab’ ich so viel für Brot bezahlt!“ she said and looked briefly as if a tear might roll down the powdered crevices of her cheeks. I wondered, briefly, if strictly speaking this was true – the price of bread, relative to income, must have been higher in the 1970s? – but this was no moment for a history lesson. What does seem to be happening is that global events are catching up with Berliners. Food riots are breaking out everywhere, in Egypt, Uruguay, Haiti. A dozen countries are restricting rice exports to head off trouble at home. Something seems to be going badly wrong. Bread really is becoming expensive – yet the rise in Getreide prices can only play a small part in this.

If I have read my Dutschke texts correctly, he would be pleased with this Zuspitzung. In his days the big global issues were overpopulation, famine and capitalist America’s evil attempts to coca-colaise its neo-colonial empire. Outside the Asta, these were marginal issues for most Berliners. Now, thanks to the internet and a different media landscape, Berliners are much more aware of global inter-connections. Georg Milbradt resigns because of the lending policies of American banks? Unthinkable in any other era of German history. Dutschke would have seen this as a pre-revolutionary situation, would have been urging Stadtguerillas to bring the unrest in the developing world to the gates of Siemens and other multi-nationals.

Study the notice-board, the Kleinanzeigen in Mema: “26er Damenrad 40 Euro Festpreis”; “Verkaufe wegen Auswanderung Hundesofa (braun) 30 Euro”; “Philips Mikrofon ca. 60 Jahre alt, Funktionsführung, 60 Euro“. These are calls for help from a middle class that – having felt only the slightest of benefits from the economic upswing – is clearing the decks for bad times ahead.

Now, walk across the Ku’damm, 100 metres down the Karlsruher Straße to Aspria, a fitness club favoured by celebrities. Read the notice-board there: “Drei Karten für Abbado”; “Mahagoni-Tisch (1850), 500 Euro”; “Wohnung in New York, günstig”; “Ferienhaus auf Sardinien zu verkaufen”. The income bracket is grander but the note of creeping panic is the same. The global crisis is moving closer, lapping at out feet.

The conclusion for Dutschke would be this: the poor and the rich are beginning to feel the strain, to lose faith in the capitalist order. The rich will try to defend this dying system with force; the poor, recognising its brotherhood with the poor of Asia and southern America, must prepare for the fight.

But, wait, here is something strange: there is no sign, anywhere in the west, of a revolution about to explode. Could it be, do you think, that Dutschke was wrong? That almost nothing written (or spoken on the barricades) by Dutschke was of lasting value? That the Gedenktafel on the Ku’damm honours a pleasant, sometimes hysterical student who, had he not been shot, would have been forgotten by now? Not a hero, but a footnote.

If Dutschke had lived he would be 68 years old and my bet is he would no longer be preaching global revolution, nor even voting for Oskar Lafontaine. He would be pinning up his ad on the Aspria notice-board: four bedroom summer house in Florida for sale.

Still, sorry about messing up your flowers Rudi! (My shoulder still hurts)

That man – silly smile, 1970s dentists’ glasses, Birkenstocks, saffron robes – doesn’t he look familiar? Sipping a raspberry Frappucino with extra caramel at Starbucks in the Ku’damm? Yes, it was almost certainly the Dalai Lama, all alone in Berlin. Understandable really: if your only political friend in Berlin was Roland Koch, you too would rather sit by yourself, sipping over-priced coffee and contemplating (as usual) the seven (six? eight?) roads to happiness.

            Various wise men – Keynes, Oscar Wilde – have suggested that it is a sign of intellectual maturity to change your opinions. I am not so sure; I don’t like change of any kind. If I like a pair of trousers I wear them every day until they fall apart, and I am a bit like that with my political beliefs. But in the case of the Dalai Lama I have to accept that I was wrong. Some months ago I criticised Angela Merkel for meeting him. It seemed like another pointless piece of conciliation theatre in which the Chancellor seems to specialise. What was the aim – to demonstrate an interest in Buddhism, in spirituality, in Tibet, in the principle of autonomous rule in police states? Or to simulate a critical position on human rights in China, in the full knowledge that German business will continue to make deals there even if (God forbid) dissident monks are strung up from lampposts. So, I was with Steinmeier on the Dalai Lama meeting: it seemed more honest somehow to treat the man in saffron as a marginal spiritual leader with good friends in Hollywood.

            Now, surely the politically honest course is to meet him in Berlin. It is the Chinese government that has upgraded him into an important political figure. This is how the communist leadership describes the Dalai Lama: “a jackal in Buddhist’s monk’s robes and an evil spirit with a human face and the heart of a beast.” Even Joschka Fischer in his heyday would have thought twice about using that kind of vocabulary. In the Chancellor’s first meeting, there was little to discuss. This week the German government had plenty to discuss – but instead hid under their desks rather than be photographed with the man in saffron. Berlin should be demanding and objective investigation into the violent suppression of the Tibetans, it should be calling for international observers to the trials of Tibetans, urging the Chinese to open the province for foreign correspondents, reminding Beijing that it has a constitutional commitment to religious freedom. Perhaps Steinmeier has been doing this behind the scenes, but now surely is the moment to go public. If the Chancellor met the Dalai Lama to underline her commitment to human rights, then surely she shouldn’t abandon her public stance when things get difficult. For sure, the Chancellor had an alibi for avoiding the Dalai Lama: she was out of town. And I suppose one could argue that Steinmeier was too tired after a whole week of defending human rights in Russia (did you hear his speech on this subject? No, I didn’t either) to find time. But surely the President was the man who should have taken care of the Tibetan guest; Horst Köhler, above party politics, concerned with the ethical life of Germans.

            I have nothing against political hypocrisy. Of course not: I’m English. It is – as a fascinating new book by the philosopher David Runciman (Political hypocrisy: the Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and beyond) makes clear – the necessary oil in the political machine. He identifies “first order hypocrisy” when politicians use public rhetoric to disguise vice as virtue. “Second order hypocrisy” occurs when politicians conceal this practice from themselves. First order hypocrisy – the culture of exaggeration and of benign deceit – is part of social existence. Second order hypocrisy is dangerous.

            The government in Berlin genuinely seems to believe that it is serving human rights by now ignoring the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, despite having embraced him when the political costs were lower. What kind of signal does that send to corporate business where corruption and moral turpitude seems to have become part of the once-proud ‘Made in Germany’ label? German voters demand clarity not only in policy but also in language. It is precisely this that is missing from the Grand Coalition.

            Germans, I know, laugh a little at the American political process. America is the land of Phineas Taylor Barnum who invented the first Wanderzirkus. His man-eating tigers, Liliputaner and bearded women performed before Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln. Now we have the Wanderzirkus of the American primaries and Germans seem to regard it as an expensive mockery of democracy. But out of it all comes a democratic essence and – because speeches are so closely monitored – a lucidity of language. At the end of it all, Americans will be left with a feeling that politics can improve lives and that it really is about creating a better world. That is what is missing in German politics.

An dem Tag, als Martin Luther King erschossen wurde, sprach Bobby Kennedy vor einer Menschenmenge vornehmlich schwarzer Amerikaner in Indianapolis. Es gab damals noch keine Mobiltelefone; niemand in der Menge wusste, dass Martin Luther King tot war. Kennedy sagte es ihnen, hörte ihr Entsetzen und improvisierte eine Rede. Sein Schluss: „Lasst uns gemeinsam die Unzivilisiertheit der Menschheit zähmen und das Leben dieser Welt besänftigen.“ Zuerst war es still dort, dann kam Applaus. In den nächsten Tagen gab es Rassenunruhen in 76 amerikanischen Städten. Aber nicht in Indianapolis.

Germans need to find that kind of language if they are to believe in the power of politics again. And that in turn means finding politicians who are not afraid of awkward situations, who do not pull down the shutters and who sit in darkened rooms when uncomfortable guests arrive in Berlin.

This is an outsider’s blog. No inside-track stuff here. I have been living in Germany as a correspondent and columnist for 15 years and the place is still a mystery. All those hidden rituals and anxieties. Strangest of all: the curiosity of Germans about the views of foreigners, their genuine interest in the judgement of outsiders. The Germans seem to be on a constant search for national identity, imagining it perhaps to be something rounded, well-formed and made of precious metal; a Lost Ark. But that’s not the way it really is. Identity is made up of moments, snapshots in an album.

So that’s what this blog will try to do: collect those moments that help us work out what is “typisch deutsch”.

Let’s hope we can get a conversation going. I will try to feed the blog a few times a week. Sometimes you will get short observations; sometimes the English version of my columns; sometimes mini-essays. Mainly it will be in English, but there will be German contributions too. Don’t be afraid to make rude comments. I certainly intend to be both rude and, if absolutely necessary, affectionate about my host country.

The Times, October 25, 2003

In Moldova the sale of an organ can raise false hopes of a better life

THE scars slashed across the abdomens of villagers from Mingir testify to the extraordinary racket in bartered kidneys that is stretching across Europe. A cluster of the poorest villages in Moldova, itself the poorest country in Europe, have become a hunting-ground for organ traders.

“He looked like you; blond, in his forties,” says Nicolae Bardan, recalling a brief meeting with the recipient of his kidney. “I heard he was from Britain or Scandinavia.”

Mr Bardan’s scar has healed cleanly but he and his neighbours feel they have been cheated out of their health and their future by profiteering middlemen. The money has long since gone: Mr Bardan was paid $3,000 from a total cost for the operation of several times that figure.

This week Members of the European Parliament endorsed a campaign to stop organ trafficking, demanding that Europeans who travel beyond the EU for kidney transplants face criminal charges on their return. They also called for tough sentences for traffickers. Under European Union law, trading in human beings for sexual purposes or labour is illegal but trading in donated organs is not. All EU countries, apart from Austria, outlaw payment for organs, but national legislation varies widely.

Mr Bardan, a slight 28-year-old farmer, stands in the bedroom of his small cottage, giving a precise account of the cash-for-kidney deal: $100 had gone to an organ scout in the village and $200 to the chief recruiter in the neighbouring community of Negrea; $120 was the cost of the bus ticket home from the Turkish clinic; and $1,000 went on building his home, some more on medical debts and a few hundred on buying coal and food for the winter as well as a bicycle for his son and himself.

Four years later, the food has been eaten, the coal burnt and one of the bicycles no longer works. Mr Bardan’s health is broken. “I am not the same man,” he stutters. “I get dizzy and when I lift anything heavy I feel that a knife has been stuck in my remaining kidney.”

The key to the organ business is in the abject poverty of this part of southeastern Europe; a no man’s land where people have to sell themselves to survive. A collective farmer such as 31-year-old Andrei Chitanu is lucky to earn €30 a month from the sale of produce. Moldavia, the fruit and vegetable orchard of the Soviet Union, is now called Moldova, a sovereign country, but barely able to feed itself.

Of 1.8 million Moldovans capable of work, 400,000 work abroad — most of them illegally. Andrei saw no choice but to sell part of his body. “We didn’t think it would be so bad, that we would never be able to work properly again.”

With his $3,000 he put a roof on his house, bought a cow, a washing machine, clothes for his family. There are more than 30 donors in Mingir and in the nearby villages perhaps another 100 have recently bartered their kidneys. At first, Turkish doctors with interpreters came on reconnaissance missions. Now the hunters are local and operate from eastern Romania to Moldova into southern Ukraine.

Anyone who drives through the countryside in the early evening understands why the organ hunters are having so much success: by 5pm the villages are blanketed in darkness, and the young people mill around in the gloom, swigging powerful home-made red wine. By 8pm many are drunk, swaying across the roads in erratically driven horse carts.

Many a local boy sees selling his kidney as the route to his dreams. Moldovan teenage couples often strike a deal: the girl works as a bar girl in the West, the boy sells his kidney, and together they dream about a better life.

“Every month someone walks into my office begging to sell an organ,” says Dr Adrian Tanase, of the Renal Transplant Section in the City Hospital of Chisinau. “This has not been done for a long time in developed countries — but here you buy or sell anything.”

The market for the body parts of these forgotten people is in the West. A local doctor who wished to remain nameless said: “Anyone — and I mean anyone — who wants a kidney quickly has to go to Turkey.” There is an edge of fear to the organ business: big money is at stake. Questions are unwelcome. The main patients are from Western Europe, including Britain and France, and from Israel.

Some of the Moldovan donors claim that they were hoodwinked. But Georghe Ungureanu, 49, must have known that he was not simply being recruited for factory work. “We were driven to a town in Ukraine but the woman who recruited us was wanted by Interpol so we switched to a second Ukrainian town and from there flew to Istanbul.”

The farmer, who paid for his daughter’s dowry with his kidney, recalls: “The woman was held by the Turkish police when we arrived and so she scribbled the address of an apartment on my arm.” He adds: “Because I had a rare blood group I had to wait two months for a recipient.”

Some of the Turkish middlemen have been closed down. Nina, the village recruiter in Mingir, has fled to Italy. Some networks are plainly being closed down, but new networks are being opened up.

The demand for kidneys is as strong as ever and the poverty in this virtually lawless main donor country is deepening.

The Times, July 27, 2007

What kind of God allows 23 religious pilgrims to survive a coach crash, yet 26 others to die? Our correspondent reports that for Poland’s devout Catholics, the struggle to make sense of what appears to be a tragic injustice is reinforcing their faith.

Ewa Prunesti was watching a comedy film on the coach’s video screen when a scream penetrated her earphones.

When the 24-year-old agricultural student regained consciousness, she was lying at the bottom of a French ravine surrounded by the smouldering corpses of fellow pilgrims. Ewa had been sitting in the third row from the back of the bus. The person who had been sitting next to her was now just a crumpled heap of bones; a passenger from the last row was alive and crying for help.

It was as if God had pointed a finger at the busload of devout Polish Roman Catholics and said: “You . . . Not you . . . You.”

The coach crashed through a roadside wall on a sharp bend at the bottom of a steep descent near Grenoble. As the vehicle flip-flopped down a 130ft ravine, some pilgrims were thrown clear. Many were incinerated in their seats when the coach burst into flame as it landed. At least 26 people were killed and some of the survivors are still fighting for their lives in hospital. Others, like Ewa, emerged with minor fractures.

n many cultures there is a bellow of rage when a seemingly avoidable catastrophe kills so many; there is a search for the guilty man, the defective machinery or the negligent bureaucrat. There is often also a more profound accusation. How many disasters have I covered as a reporter – from the mid-air crash over Lake Constance to the ski-lift blaze in Kaprun – where, afterwards, wellwishers light candles in sympathy and pin up a denunciatory note with one scrawled word: why? Meaning, of course, why God, did You let it happen?

The Poles are not like that; it is not in the nature of their Catholicism to be angry at a seemingly unjust God. The Polish cult of the Virgin Mary gives them a more forgiving tinge: she is not a remote goddess on a pedestal. She is, as some theologians have written, with the Church, not above it. When Poles kneel down to pray in front of the image of Mary they often talk to her conversationally, as to a mother. Anger at God barely comes into it.

Instead they are searching for a miracle, seeking evidence of a benign God among the carnage. They may have found it in the form of the retired 61-year-old lorry driver Jozef Mordas. When the tumbling coach came to a quivering standstill last Sunday, Mr Mordas found himself buried inside the bus under a pile of corpses, gasping for breath. He reached upwards, between dead leg and dead arm, hoping to find a grip. Instead he touched and held on to a book. This, he says helped him to stay conscious. “It’s not yet clear whether it was a prayer book or the Bible,” says the Szczecin priest Ryszard Kaminski. “Whatever – if it’s true, it’s miraculous.”

The search for a miracle is the search for meaning; it is a reassurance that God is a protector. There are Poles who believe that Karol Wojtyla’s survival after being knocked down by a German lorry during the Second World War – the future Pope was working in a quarry – was a miracle. Cynics say it was simply a bad knock. But the point is clear: miracles are one way in which God can shape individual destinies.

It was Father Kaminski who blessed the pilgrims before they set off on a tour of European shrines to the Virgin Mary. At 6am on July 10 he gave them, and their air-conditioned bus, the sign of the cross. Earlier he had heard their confessions. “They were spiritually prepared for the trials and tribulations ahead; not, of course, for death. But they knew that a pilgrimage is not easy – nor is it supposed to be.” So, naturally, it is Father Kaminski who is now facing the puzzled faces of his parishioners. A pilgrimage is supposed to bring you closer to God – but surely not in such a brutal manner.

Poland is a nation of travellers, and not just in the search for waitressing and plumbing jobs in the West. Every year well over three million Polish Catholics embark on a spiritual pilgrimage of some sort; to Pope John Paul II’s grave in Rome, to Lourdes, to Marian shrines across Europe. Above all, at this time of year, they wind their way through the country lanes of southern Poland towards the Jasna Gora Monastery in Czestochowa, which houses the Black Madonna. The icon – so-called because the image of the Virgin Mary is darkened – is supposed to have inspired a handful of Polish monks and soldiers to repel a huge Swedish attack in 1655. A miracle? The Poles seem to think so, and their trek every year is as much to do with a sense of nationhood as of spiritual renewal.

Every Polish priest over 28 speaks some Italian: Pope John Paul ensured that tens of thousands of priests did a stint in Rome to prepare them for what he saw as the missionary role of Polish Catholicism, the building of a bastion against materialism. Under the Polish Pope, accompanying believers on pilgrimages became part of the missionary task and a sure way to promotion.

“Life itself is a pilgrimage,” Father Kaminski tells his parishioners as they crowd into the narrow chapel of St Mikolaj Biskup. “Death is always with us and life on earth is transitory.” He knows that is not quite enough for parishioners who have been horrified and transfixed by the news of the catastrophe. So he adds: “We must find meaning for those who survived to understand the deaths of the others.”

I heard something similar from a pulpit in the German lakeside resort of Ueberlingen five years ago. When two jets crashed – one of them a Russian aircraft full of schoolchildren – heavy chunks of burning machinery and scorched bodies rained down on the pretty little town. Yet nobody on the ground was hurt. “We have to ask ourselves the question: why were we protected?” said a local priest at the time. “Do we now have a special mission, a special responsibility to ourselves and to God?”

This is not an academic or even purely pastoral matter for Father Kaminski. It’s personal. Among the dead in the crash was his protégé, Father Przemyslaw Redes, a burly 29-year-old, who had become a very active organiser of pilgrimages. He was a jovial, even witty figure; a popular character at theological college and one of the reasons why young worshippers were still coming to St Mikolaj. Shortly before embarking on the fatal pilgrimage he had passed his driving test and was contemplating buying a car; there was talk of him one day driving his own pilgrimage coach. As we talked with his mentor, Father Kaminski, there was a knock on the door; it was Father Redes’s distraught brother who took flight when he saw a journalist and a photographer. “Sorry,” said Father Kaminski. “This is hurting us all. I thought I could deal with this – after all I conducted 37 funerals in this parish last year. But somehow it’s not the same.”

It is, priests tell us, all about linkages; life, death and resurrection. The suffering of Christ opened the way for new life; so too accidents, with their pain and shock, can recalibrate lives. Pope John Paul, who had repeatedly declared that the Virgin Mary was the Queen of Poland, visited Fatima in Portugal where Mary is supposed to have appeared to some children. Later, in 1981, when he was shot by a Turkish fanatic in St Peter’s Square he said that Mary had, in effect, caught the bullet and saved his life and that his pilgrimage to Fatima was the key. Yet will these almost mythical linkages help Ewa Prunesti to solve the riddle of why she lived?

We meet an hour after she has been released from hospital, in the Zachod housing estate of Stargard, a garrison town that is a half-hour drive from Szczecin. She lives in her parents’ genteel apartment in a well-kept, working-class district.

Plants are suspended from the low ceilings; the fine porcelain is kept in glass cupboards for special occasions. “I don’t get the logic of it,” says Ewa in a voice dulled by painkillers, and if her neck had not been constrained by a hard plastic brace she would surely have shaken her head. She did not mean: why did God let devout Catholics die a horrible death? Rather, she meant: if I was allowed to survive and sit in my parents’ home, what is my hidden obligation? What do I have to change about my life? “All my life now,” she says, “I will be trying to work out why I was allowed to live.”

Until now, it has been a hard but focused life: studying at the agricultural academy in Szczecin, hoping to go on to become a vet, and working part-time at the local Tesco to support the family budget. No time for a boyfriend.

Now survival has set her apart. One by one, her relatives come to see her and even her grandmother greets her tentatively as if she is a privileged stranger. When we finally persuade the family to sit together for a portrait they feel safest in the living room under a huge protective portrait of Christ bearing the motto Jezu Ufam Tobie – Jesus, I put my trust in you.

Ewa’s father, Franciszek, thinks he knows why she was allowed to live. Some years ago he was told he had multiple sclerosis and since then Ewa had become even more devout. She decided to use her savings to go on the pilgrimage this year to pray for the recovery of her father – at the healing waters of Lourdes and at the Notre Dame de la Salette sanctuary that was the last port of call for the pilgrims. “When I heard what had happened, everything went dark,” said Franciszek, 56. “It was like the end of the world. She had gone there for me! And now I was desperately praying for her health instead of she for mine.” The power of prayer, in other words, is not a one-way street. The spiritual energy that Ewa poured into her father’s recovery was returned and will build a new relationship between father and daughter.

But being saved presents its own complications when so many in the community have lost loved ones. The Prunesti family – Ewa’s sister, a trained nurse, is working as a cosmetician in Folkestone – wanted to give thanks for her safe return in the local church, an echoing multistoreyed building smelling of detergent and fresh paint. It is one of several new churches that have been established on Polish housing estates since the fall of communism. “But it is difficult, you know, to turn up there and celebrate something when so many people are, you know . . .” breaks off Ewa’s mother, Jadwiga. The father chips in: “Personal joy and common suffering, that’s what we’ve got.”

The pilgrimages are likely to continue. More, says Father Slawomir Zyga, who is in the office of the Metropolitan Archbishop of Szczecin. “Catastrophes like the one we have just experienced seem likely to strengthen the resolve of young pilgrims.” In some ways the doomed coach was a microcosm of the new Polish Catholicism. There were 13-year-old boys on board (both saved) and a 70-year-old; there were shopkeepers, language teachers, nurses, students, pensioners. As they drove across Europe they would sing church anthems and recite prayers, following the lead of one of the three priests accompanying the group. It must have been a very intense experience. One of the dead was a 60-year-old paralysed former maths teacher who had hoped that a visit to Lourdes would allow her to cast aside her wheelchair.

The miracle cure did not come for her; nor did Father Przemyslaw ever fulfil his dream of driving his own pilgrim bus. But you do not have to be a professional optimist, or even a parish priest under pressure, to explain the unexplainable, to sense that something positive may emerge from Sunday’s tragedy, something more than a collection of traumatised survivors. “What happens next?” asked Ewa and, as she moves painfully across the room, repeats: “What happens next?”

The Times, December 22, 2007

Drip, drip, drip sounds the slow death knell of Santa’s Lapland hideaway, as climate change threatens to turn childhood dreams to slush

Time is running out for tourists in search of real snow and an authentic Father Christmas at Rovaniemi on the Arctic Circle.
Every year, like some extraordinary migratory species, many tens of thousands of British tourists trek to this remote northern outpost in search of the authentic Father Christmas. Kitted out with thermal underwear and Arctic explorer jumpsuits, they are treated not only to the unofficial anthem of Finnish Lapland – Wham’s Last Christmas – but also, even more ominously, to the sound of melting snow.

The Arctic Circle this week was warmer and soggier than the British Midlands. Everywhere there was the wrenching noise of snow slipping off roofs, the creak of timber. Global warming is catching up with the Santa business and there is trouble brewing in the grotto.

“I really was expecting more snow,” Terry Peates, a 53-year-old window cleaner from the Forest of Dean, said. Mr Peates remembers a cold British winter in the 1960s when a whole double-decker bus disappeared under a drift. All the Arctic has been able to offer him this Christmas is a few streaks of grey, ageing snow. “Still, it’s the first time that Ben has seen the stuff, so it has got some magic.” He pointed to his eight-year-old grandson. Behind them both was a sign next to the local lake: “Warning: thin ice.”

Rovaniemi, the administrative capital of Lapland, is on the Arctic Circle, at the same latitude as the glaciers of Greenland and grimmest corners of Siberia, where the frost sinks a kilometre into the ground. Last year it had no snow at all: this year you think twice about whether to wear a woolly hat.

“The dogs were the ones to smell global warming first,” the man who calls himself Husky Dundee, in imitation of the fictional, intrepid Australian crocodile hunter, said. The Arctic version breakfasts on a cigarette, wears leather hides, sports a long, sharp hunting knife and has the ruddy wind-chafed face of a man who often sleeps in the open, wrapped in reindeer skins.

“They hate the water, so they refuse to cross the river when it is thinner than 14 centimetres [5½in] of ice. Now we have what? Four, five centimetres maybe.”

Husky Dundee was taking The Times out with one of his dog teams, across the frozen swamps where he gathers cranberries in the summer, to show us how climate change is altering the face of the once-frozen north. As we helter-skeltered through the birch trees – I fell off the back once, Times photographer David Bebber barely stirring from the sledge to take the shot – a willow grouse, still fat from gorging on summer mosquitos, belly-flopped across our path. “Everything is changing here,” said the husky trainer, who recently ran the dog teams for the Finnish Arctic expedition. “Sure, the animals have gone into winter sleep but it will be just like 40 winks, a nap. Because the temperature today is – what? – barely freezing and usually at this time of year it is minus 15C [-2F]. Something’s gone wrong – look at the sky!” Above us, with dawn breaking, there was a huge cloud, as grey as marble, vaguely reminiscent of a nuclear mushroom.

“In 20 years in the wilderness I have never seen a sky like that,” Husky Dundee said. “It must mean something.”

The land above the Arctic Circle is a kind of early warning system for the planet; change is registered here more quickly than at the Equator. According to some predictions the Arctic Ocean could be entirely free of ice by the summer of 2013.

Levi, a resort in the far north of Finland that is becoming a favourite of buy-to-letters because, unlike Austria and Switzerland, it guarantees snow, had to withdraw as a venue for the World Alpine Slalom contest this year. The snow arrived too late. Snow cannon are being used on ski slopes close to Rovaniemi. Snow cannon in the Arctic!

“If it carries on like this I will have to move farther north,” Dundee said. “Up close to the North Pole, or maybe to the moon – really cold up there.”

As for Father Christmas, he may have to move farther north too. About 800,000 tourists visit Finnish Lapland every year and a large proportion of them, about 120,000, are British, tired of a festive season defined by plastic trees and Marks & Spencer puddings.

Every day in the lead-up to Christmas 20 charter flights a day land in Roviniemi. Farther north, in Kittila, 200 flights touch down during Christmas week from Manchester and London. Many of them are day trippers. They fly their children from England before dawn, land in Lapland, are handed their thermals and then on to Santa Park for a reindeer trip and a visit to Father Christmas. Or to the neighbouring competitor, Santa Village, where a disturbingly similar Father Christmas holds court near a post office that processes begging letters from 750,000 children a year (most come from Britain). Then it is back in the coach and on to the plane.

“The carbon emissions are just mind-boggling,” the elf, who calls herself Cranberry, said. Like most of the elves, all dressed in daft caps and baggy pants, recruited to help the Santa business, Cranberry is doing a degree in eco-tourism at the North Karelian University and one day she will be part of the Finnish team that has to manage the effects of the climate crisis on her home region.

“Three or four-day trips are OK, gentler on the environment,” she said. “But I would ban these in-and-out tourists and the snow-mobilers.” Snow-mobiles, as powerful as motor-bikes, spew out diesel fumes that linger in the air. They are the transport of choice for the post-reindeer Lapps.

A three-day trip to Lapland does not come cheap. It can cost between £700 and £1,200 a person, plus about £300 for extras. A family of four can easily find itself spending £7,000.

“It is a lot of money,” a British travel representative said at the Arctic Hotel Pohtimo, a half-hour drive out of Rovaniemi. “But the logic is this: kids in England often stop believing in Father Christmas by the age of 5 or 6. Other children at school start to sow doubts. But if they come here, they get awed into belief.

“And you know what? Their childhood lasts a couple of years longer. That is what people are paying for.”

The illusion only really works, however, if there is snow and a nip in the air. Otherwise you might as well be taking children to the local grotto in Croydon. “Our children were told that they would be the last generation to experience Christmas snow so they had better make the most of it,” Sharon Carlyle, who works for Aer Lingus in Dublin, said.

Certainly the Carlyle children made the most of the huge, vaguely sinister snowmen that lurk like statues of forgotten dictators across the Lapp tourist sites: at the airports, at Santa Park, Santa Village and in the centre of Roviniemi.

As for Eliot Carlyle, 8, he was one of many thousands of children to be struck dumb this week in the presence of Father Christmas sitting on a kind of throne. The great man speaks English with a Finnish accent and has breath that smells of sour milk.

When I asked him what children were asking for this year, he replied with a force that made me recoil: “Ten Dovi” Ten Doves? No such luck: Nintendo Wii.

Father Christmas saved Roviniemi. In past centuries it was a centre of the fur trade but the German Army burnt down the place when they were forced to retreat from the north by Finnish ski-troops.

In 1950 Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the American President Franklin Roosevelt, visited the village at the invitation of the Lutheran Church to inspect the damage. A wooden hut was built, straddling the Arctic Circle, to honour the occasion. That cabin became part of the rebranding of Lapland as Santa-land.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Finns played the Santa card for all it was worth. Reindeer herding, a hard calling, suddenly seemed glamorous. Even the national carrier, Finnair, describes itself as the Official Airline of Santa Claus.

Now global warming may force Santa to abandon Roviniemi and move towards the Pole because, for the British child, there is no Santa without snow, no Christmas without the white stuff. It is, in these merry days, a sad moment.